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TemplaVoila 1.4.2 released

Yesterday the 2nd team release of TemplaVoila was uploaded into the TER. It’s basically a maintenance release which fixes more than 100 bugs. But since we haven’t been that straight distinguishing between bug and usability feature, you’ll see a couple of new things within this release.

The high level release notes are:

• page module is now customizable with CSS and JavaScript
• handling of static data structures are improved and fully working now
• wizards are improved, new page wizard is more explaining
• visual cleanups
• new hooks for eTypes (elements added by mapping interface)
• new classes for preview in page module, easy to override by extensions
• added missing localisations
• enhanced drag-and-drop in page module
• over 100 Bugs are fixed
• updated manual

During the installation your TYPO3 Extension Manager will ask to perform a couple of database upgrades. These upgrades aren’t really critical because they just enlarge some database fields, which will make sure that your data really fit’s in.

Just to point one thing out – especially the page module has been improved to be more flexible in certain parts.

These lines of TSConfig can be used to add CSS or JavaScript into the page module and enable easy customizations:

mod.web_txtemplavoilaM1.stylesheet = ../fileadmin/css/tvpagemodule.css

mod.web_txtemplavoilaM1.javascript {
  file1 = ../fileadmin/templates/js/jquery.js
  file2 = ../fileadmin/templates/css/backend.js
}

Further customizations is provided using the “mod.web_txtemplavoilaM1.blindIcons” configuration or with individual content preview classes (configured though “$GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS']['EXTCONF']['templavoila']['mod1']['renderPreviewContent']” – see ext_localconf.php).

We haven’t discussed what the direction for the next versions really looks like. From my perspective better TYPO3 integration, some kind of code cleanup and also the integration of some features which arise with TYPO3 4.4 will be somehow on our schedule. But since TemplaVoila isn’t a one man show anymore, this isn’t just my decision and in addition I’d like to encourage everyone to send feedback, bugfixes or new features just to give us an impression what you like or dislike in the current version.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank everyone who was somehow involved in the release, especially Steffen Kamper who shared lot of inspiration and who has spent many hours to debug and fix some really tricky issues.

Re: Farewell, TemplaVoila!

Dmitry decided to leave the TemplaVoilà project today and he handed the extension-leadership to me. Since this is a very abrupt change and since there was lot’s of (mis)communication involved I’d like to use this blogpost to answer his “Farewell, TemplaVoila!” post (he turned off the commenting function).

As you might know Steffen Kamper and I joined the TemplaVoilà team some time ago and since Dmitry wasn’t very motivated to maintain the extension anymore, we took over and tried to make TemplaVoilà ready for TYPO3 4.3 (see Dmitry’s clarification below). We also tried to get rid of the over 250 listed bugs from bugs.typo3.org. This went fine for quite some time and we released version 1.4.0 and 1.4.1 in November parallel to TYPO3 4.3. Unfortunately the release come a little too fast for us and a couple of major bugs couldn’t be fixed by that time. After that release we had a meeting with Dmitry and we all agreed to release 1.4.2 in the beginning of January. We found and fixed tons of bugs and also implemented long awaited features in the meantime. We also had the luck that others found new motivation and started to send feedback and started to test TemplaVoilà with us. (Special thanks to Uschi, Jeff and Ron).
Three weeks ago we decided that the current state is “ready to release” and we told Dmitry that it’s up to him to release 1.4.2. Quite some time passed by and today he used several channels (Twitter, Facebook and Newsgroups) to tell the world what he found:

No TV 1.4.2 release soon. Found a bug in page module with unlinking in 1 minute after starting tests. I am severely disappointed by this

He was right – a very obvious bug showed up in the page-module within TYPO3 4.2. Unfortunately nobody saw it and it also seems that some of us are still unable to reproduce it. Anyways — in my opinion — he choose the wrong way to communicate that. Instead of talking to Steffen and me, he decided to talk to anyone else. I wrote him a mail and told him that I didn’t like the way he brought this up and asked for a Skype meeting to discuss how to proceed. After serveral emails back and forth and after others joined the communication, Dmitry decided (without anyone of us asking for it) to leave the team and hand over the leadership. To make it clear to everyone: the discussion started because of one JavaScript error and a few icons in the backend which he didn’t like very much. The Skype meeting never happend – although it would have saved lot’s of time and confusion for all of us.

I’m not very happy with his decision, because this leaves lot’s of questions and because we loose a very diligent developer. But it seems that there’s currently no way to convince him that he might be wrong.

As team Steffen and I will try to continue the development and improvement of TemplaVoilà, especially because it’s one of the most important benefits TYPO3 can offer. I ask everyone to join and contribute some time for testing or feedback. I dislike Dmitry’s approach to fork TemplaVoila and host it somewhere else (see Dmitry’s clarification below). I’m inviting him to rejoin the team at any time and work in a constructive way with us. I’m still convinced that all this just happend because miscommunication and not because of “real” issues.

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In addition it also seems that others offended Dmitry and asked him not to stop the process anymore – I understand his distraction. He did a very good job in the past, he was open for our improvements and his biggest concern was quality not power or money or anything. Being offended for something you do in your freetime without any payment and being offended by people, who earn money from their clients with your (free) work, is always distracting. Please think about that in future communications with any open source software developer.

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If you wonder how to get in touch with us: http://bugs.typo3.org lists all known bugs and their status. Report new bugs there or try to add new information to existing ones. Team discussion, in regards to fixed bugs or new features, happens, compareable to the TYPO3 Core, in the “typo3.team.templavoila” list on “lists.typo3.org”. If you need regular feedback or help with TemplaVoilà please use the “typo3.projects.templavoila” list.

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* Update 05.03.2010: After I posted that the link to that blogpost on Facebook, Dmitry commented it and just to be fair, that’s what he said:

Thanks for your post. It is fair and explains the situation well. I would only clarify two moments: (1) I am not forking TV but creating a version for myself. I do not plan to release it to TER or anywhere. It is a TV for me as personally I like it (2) “Dmitry wasn’t very motivated to maintain the extension anymore” is not exactly so, rather to my taste TV already did all it had to do. I invited others to move TV further because I did not need anything else from it. Thanks again.

TemplaVoila 1.4 released…

A new version of  TemplaVoila (ter) (forge) has just been released. Besides the great fact that this is the first team-release of TemplaVoila, the high-level improvements within the pagemodule (drag’n'drop),  the mapping module and the FCE editing forms and besides lot’s of bug fixes, there are a few very nice features which make the day-to-day work with TemplaVoila much easier.

The list of things which happend in 1.4 can be seen on bugs.typo3.org (preselected filter). The following list contain my favorite fixes which happened unter the hood:

1) Delete content within the pagemodule (instead of unlinking)
By default you will still see the “unlink” icon within the pagemodule but one small setting within User- or PageTSconfig will show up delete buttons as well. There are two modes:
mod.web_txtemplavoilaM1.enableDeleteIconForLocalElements = 1
will show unlink and delete icons for local elements side-by-side
mod.web_txtemplavoilaM1.enableDeleteIconForLocalElements = 2
will show the delete icon and hide the unlink icon whenever possible.

Details: http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=6869

2) Skip edit screen after a new content element was created
Especially for container items it’s anoying that the TYPO3 edit screen opens up after such an item was created. The setting noEditOnCreation within the meta configuration part of your datastructure can be used to change that.

Details: http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=8079

3) Hide TemplaVoila field values and cleanup the pagemodule
Another problem within large projects is a messed up pagemodule. Very often the field data of flexible content elements shows up without any chance to hide it. Use  disableDataPreview within the meta configuration part of your datastructure to change that.

Details: http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=11520

4) Define default record values
A proper setup contains good default values. Within datastructures you can define default values for your flexform-fields and from now on TemplaVoila also provides the possibility to define default-values for the fields of the parent record. The “default / TCEForms / <fieldname>” parts within the meta configuration part of your datastructure does this. Very useful usage for container elemente is:

<meta type=”array”>
<langDisable>1</langDisable>
<default>
<TCEForms>
<sys_language_uid>-1</sys_language_uid>
</TCEForms>
</default>
</meta>

Details: http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=8759

There’s also a completly new “New content element”-wizard which can be configured with PageTSConfig – this wizard brings some additional feature for default-value configuration. I’m going to bring that up in another post soon.

5) sectionCount / sectionPos register in TypoScript
Rending fields which are nested in sections is not always fun. Expecially when it comes to position detection for the current item. Two new registers try to help in such situtations:

tx_templavoila_pi1.sectionCount holds the overall amount of items within the current section
tx_templavoila_pi1.sectionPos holds the position of the curren titem -starting with 1

Example:
10 = TEXT
10.value = (last item)
10.if.equals.data = register:tx_templavoila_pi1.sectionPos
10.if.value.data = register:tx_templavoila_pi1.sectionCount

Details: http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=7263

noEditOnCreation

disable TemplaVoila new page wizard

new page wizard

That’s pretty easy just paste this into the Page TSConfig of your rootpage and you’re done:
mod.web_list.newPageWiz.overrideWithExtension >
Now you might wonder how TemplaVoila knows what template it should use to render the page – but due to the TV’s default behaviour to inherit the page-template this should not be a problem if there’s at least a TemplaVoila page template assigned for your root-page.

But honestly you should just upload a thumbnail and write some sentences about your page-templates – this should raise the user’s happiness more than just disabling the wizard.

TYPO3 templavoila rtfm

Dmitry and Steffen included some of the AOE guys (including me) into the TemplaVoila team and we all try to contribute into the project from now on. Therefore I just checked the Unit-tests for TemplaVoila and tried to find a way how to improve them in the future and somewhere within the tx_templavoila_api -Class I found the PageTS key “tx_templavoila.storagePid“. That seems to be some kind of nice workaround for everyone who’s not interested to mess up the TYPO3 general record storage page with the TemplaVoila DS/TO storage-folder. I wonder how many other hidden gems will find the way into day-light in the future